Beatrice Robson
2024 - 2027 FFAR Fellows
Introduction
The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) is pleased to announce the seventh cohort of graduate students to be accepted to the FFAR Fellows Program.
Beatrice Robson is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia and was selected as a FFAR Fellow studying Agricultural and Applied Economics.
Keep reading to learn more about Beatrice's research and why she applied to be a FFAR Fellow.
About Me
Hometown: Gig Harbor, Washington, United States
I grew up in the rural Pacific Northwest, a wild region dotted by timber towns and fishing marinas. The complex balance of harvesting natural resources and maintaining sustainable stewardship over the land fascinated me as a young child. I then spent six years working on a small farm and gained a deep respect for the vulnerability and resilience of agricultural systems. The new reality of oppressive wildfires across the region gives me a deep sense of urgency to transform our world toward a more resilient and sustainable future.
Food as an expression of culture is one of my great loves. My warmest childhood memories are of baking with my great grandmother, a French immigrant who raised her children on the family’s working farm. I enjoy experiencing food from all over the world, with a particular interest in historical recipes and nutrition. I’ve served Thanksgiving dinner entirely from recipes collected from the 18th century, made a multi-course meal representing decades of Soviet history, and recreated numerous traditional foods of early peoples.
My quantitative background and experience in manufacturing and corporate sustainability has given me a firm academic and professional foundation. But, it’s been my lifelong passion for food and our relationship to the natural world that inspires my research every single day.
Why the FFAR Fellows Program?
Adam Smith, regarded by many as the father of economics, famously composed the allegory of the pin factory to demonstrate the power of collaboration between specialists; in this spirit, I recognize my ability to understand our food systems’ relationship to climate change is predicated on robust relationships with other experts in academia, industry, and the public sector. The interdisciplinary mission of the FFAR Fellows program is ideal for sparking such relationships.
Academia is not my ultimate career goal– I wish to be closer to the implementation of changes. I aim to connect the public and private sectors, ideally in policy design and analysis at a governmental agency. The United States is the world’s second largest GHG emitter. Though we’ve made great progress decarbonizing the energy sector through investments in renewables, agriculture is largely absent from domestic climate change policy despite its large contributions to our emissions.
I was a nontraditional student who pursued higher education in my late 20’s, and my perspective benefits from my diverse work history. My time in agriculture and manufacturing taught me about implementing decisions on the ground, and working with Fortune 500 companies to identify sustainable strategies showed me that we need to be doing more to promote and enable green transitions. I believe with the right coalitions and carefully crafted policy, we can be world leaders in sustainable agricultural transitions, and I’m confident the FFAR Fellows community is the ideal place to join and forge these coalitions.
My Research
As is typical in economics, I am conducting several closely related projects revolving around climate change and consumer demand. My work models household food purchases and subsequent environmental and nutrition effects, providing insight into the unseen impact of American shoppers’ dietary habits and behavior following environmental shocks and policy decisions.
I am investigating carbon pricing on food in the United States, a market-based intervention to correct market failure by internalizing the cost of environmental damage caused during production. Similar policies have been studied elsewhere, particularly in European zones, but my work innovates by focusing on American consumers. This work empowers policymakers by estimating (1) emissions mitigation potential, (2) changes in purchasing decisions and subsequent nutritional impacts, (3) behavioral differences between consumer demographics, and (4) regressive impacts on low-income consumers who may already experience food insecurity.
To investigate climate change’s effects on health and nutrition, I assess consumer reactions to fluctuations in prices of specialty produce such as peaches. Most of the 2023 Southeastern peach crop was lost due to unfavorable weather. The resulting price increase presented consumers with a choice to pay the increased price, substitute other goods, or switch to preserved options such as canned peaches higher in sugar. This project quantifies behavior under increasingly common conditions; the geographic concentration of numerous specialty crops makes the U.S. fresh produce supply chain vulnerable to the increasing frequency and severity of adverse weather events resulting from climate change.
